Production
After a long career producing comedy shorts, producer Hal Roach was looking to expand into long-form films, and found a property in The Jovial Ghosts, a semi-risqué 1926 novel by Thorne Smith. Roach immediately wanted Cary Grant to play George Kerby, but he had difficulty getting the actor to agree to play the part, since Grant was concerned about the supernatural aspects of the story. Assurance from Roach that the screwball aspects of the story would be played up – plus a fee of $50,000 – were sufficient to convince Grant to do the film.
For Grant's opposite number, Roach was interested in Jean Harlow, and as Topper W. C. Fields, but Harlow was too ill, and Fields turned down the offer. When Roaxch reached out to Constance Bennett, she was imnpressed enough with the property that she agreed to be paid less than her usual $40,000 fee.
Topper was shot at Hal Roach Studios in Culver City, and location shooting took place at the entrance to the Bullock's department store on Wilshire Boulevard – as the entrance to the "Seabreeze Hotel" – and at a location on San Rafael Avenue in Pasadena, California.
Read more about this topic: Topper (film)
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“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
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“The society based on production is only productive, not creative.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)